Decline, and non-overlapping magisteria

This isn't a post about the late/great Steve Gould's theory about the mutually exclusive domain of the sciences and religion, but is instead a reflection on the non-overlapping natures of expertise in one's own domain and one's supposed "expertise" in other domains -- they just don't overlap. Alan Turing once wrote that you had a fundamental right to make pronouncements on other domains because you mastered one domain. A statement that if taken literally usually gets you ignored by those in the know because you become, in essence, an asshole.

It's doubly ironic then that Turing himself is the brunt of the latest attempts at unqualified pronouncing, by none other than a recent Turing Award recipient -- Peter Naur. Now, Naur is as qualified as one gets ... in computer science. In the January 2007 edition of Communications of the ACM, Naur rages against the supposed status quo in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and philosophy in his "Computing versus Human Thinking", accusing these fields of actively surpressing his work, and ignoring William James' seminal Principles of Psychology.

In it, Naur rehashes his up-till-now unpublished "Synapse-State Theory of Mental Life", which he claims, marks "the beginning of that twenty year period that it usually takes to have a scientific breakthrough accepted." The inspiration of this theory is his belief that human thinking does not behave like a computer, because a computer doesn't have the "adaptive" elements that a human brain does. He asserts this before describing in detail with flowcharts, process diagrams and language how the brain works according to his theory -- there is no undecidability proof of these "adaptive" elements, nor any argument why an undergrad couldn't program his model in a computer. The idea that the brain's physicality cannot be modeled by a computer resembles the works of Penrose and Lucas, but no reference to them is given, just the vague statement that digital computers can't.

The content of the rest of the paper itself is remarkable only to the extent that a distinguished computer scientist is reduced to clawing, foot-stamping polemics. And the appeals to his own authority, and the name-dropping of William James and Charles Sherrington, works well with the confused jumbling together of philosophy of science, program semantics and numerous proclamations that his work is really, really -- no, really -- "empirical".

Here, an iconic and wonderous non-sequitur (the conclusion of his "anti-philosophical dictionary"):

"The study is based on pronouncements from 80 scientists and scholars from a variety of fields, all professors at Copenhagen University. These pronouncements confirm that the influence of philosophy on science and scholarship is confusion."

And here, with a scientific quack-like suspicion:

"I gradually came to realize that the whole field of psychology, which supposedly is concerned with mental life, during the twentieth century has become entirely misguided into an ideological position such that only discussions that adopt the computer inspired form of description of mental life is accepted, while any other form, including the form developed by William James in his Psychology, is rejected as inadmissible and unpublishable."

And silly pronouncments, here on his "analysis" of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Psychology and the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology :

"Most of the articles examined are found to be marred by fallacies, mostly ideological."

And many supposedly "empirical" statements supported only because William James said it once:

"First of all, the most prevalent feature of our experiences and actions are habits. And James immediately points out: habits are grounded in the plasticity of the nervous system. Side by side with habits James describes instincts, which are, as it were, the origin of habits."

But it's not that Naur just doesn't realize that his empirical support is over 90 years old, he does:

"The Synapse-State Theory of mental life is grounded empirically partly in mental life as it is known to anyone and partly in neurophysiological insight into the nervous system as this was established around 1910."

Apparently, "introspective" and "William James said it 90 years ago, and James was right" means "empirical".

In the end, I felt sad for Naur and wondered whether the editors of the Communications of the ACM felt the same way, and so published the Turing Award recipient's Turing lecture. Usually, the decline of genius is much more heartbreaking if it wasn't so arrogant. Or maybe it's heartbreaking because it is.